Covid has been a challenge for everyone, but everyone still needs to eat, farmers continue to buy new kit and machinery manufacturers are busy. Take Pöttinger, for example, which is on target to enjoy its best ever business year.

It is not yet set in stone, but with just a few weeks to go until the end of the current financial year on July 31, the company expects to report a 2020/2021 turnover of around €395m. This is a sizeable increase on the €366m of 2019/2020 and exceeds the previous best ever figure of €382m in 2018/2019.

Speaking at the virtual press launch of the new Jumbo 7000 series forage wagons (full report in latest issue), Gregor Dietachmayr, spokesman of the executive board, confirms Pöttinger is very busy and has well-filled order books.

It could have been very different and 16 months ago when the company had to brainstorm the best way to deal with Covid it had no idea what could happen.

“We had to be careful and even reduced our manufacturing output slightly to reduce the risk of creating too high machine inventories, should the demand have shrunk,” said Mr Dietachmayr.

“We were surprised to find the demand for new machines actually increased. We were lucky. It is a bit strange and I am not really very happy about benefitting off the back of a virus because we were just doing our job. So too were farmers.”

Gregor Dietachmayr (spokesman of the executive board) confirmed Pöttinger is getting stronger overseas. “It is our clear intention grow further and we are very pleased with the steady growth in North America.”

This year’s turnover will be up, but there is no change in the distribution and the domestic market of Austria still accounts for 10% of machine sales.

Exports make up 90% of turnover and Germany (19%) and France (15%) remain the two biggest markets. Grassland kit (mowers, tedders and rakes) account for 46% of turnover, followed by tillage equipment (16%), balers and loader wagons (15%) and drills (9.0%).

Covid did not stop the company from further increasing its international sales network last year, opening subsidiary number 17 in Poland. Pöttinger opened its first international subsidiary in France in 1999. This was followed by Switzerland (2003), Italy (2004), Canada (2005), Ukraine (2007), Australia, Slovakia and USA (2008), Russia (2010), the UK, Belgium and Ireland (2012) and Scandinavia and China (2016).